The blocks above (from left to right) are the Improved Chest, Improved Crafting Table, and Improved Furnace.

Improved Chest

The Improved Chest is crafted via a Vanilla chest with flint above and below it. Not only does this chest have one additional row of inventory space, but it will neither form double chests nor drop its inventory upon breaking. Additionally, if any mod extends this chest (correctly), it will retain its inventory when crafted into an upgraded version! (To see an example of this, check out Gemulation [another mod by me].) If you have a chest in your inventory that isn’t empty, it gains a tool-tip to tell you:

Improved Crafting Table

The ICT is crafted (shapelessly) with a vanilla crafting table and a piece of flint. (An alternate recipe to use just the vanilla table is available in the configs, but it defaults to the one with flint so that it doesn’t conflict with the TiCon recipe.) Apart from rendering the items in the table and the final product (as you’ve probably seen in the many images here), the ICT will also retain its inventory when you close the GUI.

Improved Furnace

The Improved Furnace is crafted from a vanilla furnace with flint above and below it. Somehow this allows the furnace to convert any solid fuel (or lava buckets) placed within it into a buffer which it draws from as needed, basically removing the waste of burning a whole piece of (char)coal to cook one item. The internal buffer is just large enough to hold the fuel from one bucket of lava, so if there is any mod item that adds a block/item with more fuel, it will not be usable with this furnace.

Upgraded Furnaces

These furnaces (iron, gold, diamond, redstone, and lapis) are crafted with an Improved Furnace (or one of the other four) and two of the corresponding resources. (Note: the redstone and lapis varieties require blocks and not dust.) Each of these has a unique combination of stats and upgrade slots, so pick one that fits your needs the best!

Furnace Upgrades

Please note that the Improved Furnace does not accept upgrades.

These three items can upgrade the processing speed, fuel efficiency, and fuel capacity of the furnace. These are crafted using a diamond, four gold ingots, a block of lapis, and either 3 blocks of redstone, 3 blaze rods, or 3 Improved Furnaces (which correspond to the Speed, Fuel Efficiency, and Fuel Capacity upgrades, respectively). Sneak-use these on an upgraded furnace to install it. (You can get the upgrade back by breaking the furnace.) Note: All LIT Furnace upgrades can be placed in any furnace that extends the Improved Furnace (e.g. Gemulation Gem Furnaces).

Block of Charcoal

This should be pretty straightforward; this is a block of charcoal (crafted with 9 charcoal). This is useful for compressing inventory and fueling machines a bit longer!

Solid-Fueled Generator

This is crafted with an Improved Furnace and two redstone torches as shown above. As its name implies, the Solid-Fueled Generator takes in any burnable material (including buckets of lava) and converts it into RF at 40RF/t. But be careful! The burn time of anything you put into the generator is half of its normal value! (For example, a block of charcoal would normally burn for 16000 ticks in a furnace but will only burn for 8000 in the generator.) Also note that you can insert fuel into any side, but you cannot extract empty buckets automatically. (Yes, this was intentional.)

Graves

Graves will form when you die (obviously) and will store all of your items (including any baubles, if you have that installed) inside. Only the player who died will be able to retrieve their items by simply walking over their grave. Configs allow disabling graves (as well as whether or not graves can replace still/flowing water/lava).